In a July 16th Op Ed piece, Thom Hartman rails against President Obama’s apparent embrace of Friedman-style free trade which Clinton and both Bush’s championed.

Our economy has gone into the toilet over the past 30 years, and President Obama and his advisors think “free trade” is the solution. Like Bill Clinton and both George Bush’s, he’s so enamored of it he’s even recommending it to poor African nations.

Yet “free trade” is a guaranteed ticket to the poorhouse for any nation, and the evidence is overwhelming. The concept was introduced, in fact, by Henry VII, as something that England should encourage other countries to do while it maintained protectionism; a process known as the 1485 Tudor Plan that led to the rapid industrialization of England and the deeper impoverishment of its trading “partners.”

With no evident irony or understanding of how South Korea went about becoming a modern economic powerhouse, on Friday, July 10, 2009, President Obama lectured the countries of Africa from Ghana, where he was visiting.

Hartman goes on to walk the reader through South Korea’s economic ascension built on central government controlled industry development and strong protectionist tariffs. He then talks through examples of successful protectionist strategies employed by Japan for Toyota and our own early history of protectionist polices. He ends with this warning:

If President Obama and our Congress don’t soon learn the lessons Alexander Hamilton taught us in 1791, which he learned from Henry VII and were borrowed by Japan, South Korea, and China, we’ll continue to see American industry slowly die. And with it will go the American middle class.

Discussion questions: So who is right? Hartman, Friedman, neither, both? Where do we go from here?

My post:

The part that Hartman and Friedman both miss is that today’s interconnected world is far more complex than either the example of Korea or Japan or even the early US seem to demonstrate. This is not a time to debate protectionism or free trade. A third, new model is needed that recognizes the need to protect fledgling industries early in their development and allows for the reality of a necessarily interconnected financial and resource world economy.

One reason that Clinton’s push to true free trade failed (so far) for the US manufacturing industry was the failure of labor to participate in the dialogue to create a new labor/industry paradigm and the failure of leadership by politicians and key industry leaders to do the same. Clinton moved forward without fully appreciating the difficulty in moving embedded interest groups to a new thought paradigm. Holding onto past practices has so far held us back.

One of these African countries just may be the one that shows us the path to economic prosperity in a world that has moved on from both Friedman’s and Hartman’s prescriptions.

A recent article in the New York Times entitled Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race discusses a consumer segment that we don’t hear about much: people who don’t neatly fit into the five racial buckets now being used by the U.S. Census.

According to the article, “The old categories are weakening … as immigration and the advancing age of marriage in the United States fuel a steady rise in the number of interracial marriages. The 2000 Census counted 3.1 million interracial couples, or about 6 percent of married couples. For the first time, the Census that year allowed respondents to identify themselves as being two or more races, a category that now includes 7.3 million Americans, or about 3 percent of the population.”

It’s not yet a big segment, but it’s one that’s growing in terms of visibility and identity, in part fueled by the mixed race heritage of Senator Barack Obama.

Though some choose a multiple race identity, others tend to stick to a one-race label; the decision of choosing a racial identity is often a deeply personal one. According to the article, racial identification “is influenced by how and where they were reared, how others perceive them, what they look like and how they themselves come to embrace their identity.”

Discussion questions: Have the old racial categories become irrelevant? What are the implications for those companies that are specifically targeting specific racial groups with a marketing campaign?

My post:

From my observations and experience, issues surrounding race tend to diminish with higher education and income levels. The more people understand others people and feel comfortable about their own financial status, the less likely they are to seek labels to insulate themselves against “others”, based on race or other definitions.

I believe the rich dialogue brought on by both Senator Obama’s and Senator Clinton’s candidacies is beneficial toward getting our country to move beyond race and gender stereotypes. I am optimistic that we are on the right track in this regard.

The marketing question will, in turn, become moot as cultures mix together both via interracial marriages and simply through proximity. The focus should always be on listening to what the customer is saying and observing what they are doing. That is always the recipe for marketing success.